ARCH: Rusilience

Rusilience, is a workshop aims to achieve RUral reSIELINCE, through developing traditional rural housing by locally feasible structural/construction systems.

CONTENT / Climate change resisting strategies and rapid transformation in developing countries focus on designing systems which modernize cities and make their structures resilient in the face of natural disasters. Unfortunately, the process neglects rural areas in countries as Turkiye, which results in the abandon of rural areas and immigration to big cities and urban centers. In central Anatolia, and around the capital Ankara, a seismic prone area, the plans seeks either to transform the villages into concrete high-rise buildings, or (hobby gardens) with type of container slum housing.

The workshop seeks to use traditional rural structural systems and/or construction methods as a reference to develop a modern, cost efficient, and easy to build structural system for rural housing to help enhancing the resilience of these rural areas, protecting its traditions, and encouraging people to stay in their villages

AIMS / Designing a resilient structural system for a small rural house using available local materials and learning from rural traditional architecture .
After identifying a village, or a rural center, we will choose a local traditional structural system, and think how to develop it to become more resilient and compatible with modern context and needs.

  • Analysing traditional rural structural system.
  • Understanding rural resilience.
  • Introduce yourself to the class.
  • Defining your working group.
  • Work as a team in different contexts.

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METHOD /

1st working day: Introduce your rural context and the chosen traditional structural/construction system in a 4min video analyzing risks with the strengths and weaknesses.

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Group work according to your common interests. Dvefine possibilities of system enhancement to suggest more resilient system, a story board (free technique).
2nd day: Final crit. Design the new structural system/ or draw the details of the modifications on the traditional rural system you have analyzed.

SCHEDULE /

2-Week Workshop. Weekly 4-hour class arranged with the students:

Introduction / 14 Oct 2022.
Video + Story board / 21 Oct 2022.
Final Crit / 28 Oct 2022.

EVALUATION / The design should respond to the following requirements:

  • Did it enhance the preparedness to resist hazards?
  • Is it easier or more difficult to construct?
  • Does it require special technologies and instruments?
  • How it affects the cost of construction?
  • Is the technology and materials available in the site?
  • Who can build it?
  • Specialists, contractors or locals with the help of the community?
  • Does it enable future expansion?

Bibliography /

  1. VerSus Project: Heritage for Tomorrow, Vernacular Knowledge for Sustainable Architecture.
  2. Resilient Structures and Infrastructure (Ehsan Noroozinejad Farsangi)
  3. Rural resilience as a new development concept(Wim J.M. Heijman)

Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University (Turkiye) /

Salah Hajismail (salah.hajismail@aybu.edu.tr)